57 - Cultivating the Emergency Mind with Dan Dworkis

<p class="p1">The emergency mind is cool under pressure. But how do you get there? For most us, it’s not an innate skill. Dan Dworkis MD, PhD lays out the path: graduated pressure, deliberate training, tired moves, and acknowledging the suboptimal.</p> <p class="p1"><strong>Guest Bio:</strong> Dan Dworkis MD, PhD is an emergency physician who is a clinical professor of emergency medicine at USC Keck School of Medicine. He's also host of the <a href= "https://soundcloud.com/emergencymind/episode-1"><span class= "s1">Emergency Mind podcast</span></a> that focuses on helping individuals and teams perform better under pressure and the author of <a href="https://www.emergencymind.com/book"><span class= "s1">The Emergency Mind: Wiring Your Brain for Performance Under Pressure</span></a>. </p> <p class="p1"> </p> <p class="p2"><strong>We discuss:</strong></p> <ul> <li class="p2"><strong>Deploying psychological countermeasures when you’re under stress and dealing with uncertainty [05:40];</strong></li> <li class="p2"><strong>Whether the approach to managing pressure is universal for all stressful situations [11:15];</strong></li> <li class="p2"><strong>Different modes of thought: system 1, system 2, and the recognition-primed decision-making model [15:50];</strong></li> <li class="p2"><strong>The deliberate path to becoming an expert (beyond just repetition) [20:00];</strong></li> <li class="p2"><strong>The value of training with an idea of graduated pressure [21:45];</strong></li> <li class="p2"><strong>What it means to borrow pressure from other events to succeed in something that's unrelated [25:50];</strong></li> <li class="p2"><strong>The Yerkes–Dodson law [28:45];</strong></li> <li class="p2"><strong>Why sangfroid is a good thing and how you do it</strong> <strong>[35:20];</strong></li> <li class="p2"><strong>The path to excellence which goes far beyond mastery of a specific skill [38:30];</strong></li> <li class="p2"><strong>How acknowledging the suboptimal nature of a situation when something goes wrong can help